The Paradox of ‘Impersonal Autobiography’: Albert Luthuli’s Let My People Go

Abstract

Autobiographies are about selves, and one can reasonably expect that in writing an autobiography the authorial subject is making a claim of personal significance, and is, in the text, engaging in self-assertion and self-display. Might one not then question whether an autobiography which strives to portray the autobiographical subject’s selflessness could be effective? This is an important issue in relation to Albert Luthuli’s Let My People Go (1962) since it typically foregrounds politico-historical analysis, in keeping with the narrative’s evident the didactic intent, and diminishes focus on the autobiographical subject. The autobiography depicts an autobiographical narrator and subject who embrace humility and the ideal of selflessness. Luthuli’s narrator ensures that readers know that he is not laying claim to his own importance, and he does this in part by adopting strategies such as reminding readers of the exemplary shape of his experience and his lack of ambition in relation to his political career. Furthermore, Luthuli is reticent about his private life and personal relationships. Nonetheless, Let My People Go is effective as autobiography; this is because – not in spite of – of its portrayal of the autobiographical subject’s selfless self. In this article I make a case for renewed attention to Luthuli’s autobiography and argue that readers learn a great deal about the autobiographical subject – and his ethical values – through the narrator’s refusal to engage in self-display.

Keywords:

• Albert Luthuli
• autobiography
• humility
• didactic intent
• ethical values

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Nobel Prize organisation notes that Luthuli preferred to have his name spelled as Lutuli and favoured his Zulu name Mvumbi over Albert John (Haberman 1972). (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1960/lutuli/biographical/). This is also the spelling used in Mary Benson's 1963 biography. I use the spelling as per author name for Let My People Go.

2 I employ the masculine pronoun as this is most appropriate for a discussion of Luthuli’s autobiography.

3 First published in 1962 by Collins (London) and McGraw-Hill (New York).

4 Luthuli was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize, but only received the award on 10 December 1961. The date, 10 December, is the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

5 Martin Luther King Jr (1964) and Kofi Anan (2001). Moolakkattu notes that in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on 10 December, 2001, Kofi Anan credited Luthuli as being the one who “set the standard I have sought to follow throughout my working life” (2020, 103).

6 The title calls on Albert Luthuli to return from the afterlife to help a suffering South Africa; he is one of the black leaders resurrected by the unseen saviour, “Morena” (Ngaboh-Smart 1999).

7 Chief Albert Luthuli Municipality is in the province of Mpumalanga.

8 Lecture series: Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

9 UNISA has set up the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair. Outside of South Africa, the University of Jos in Nigeria has established the position of the Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large (Asmal 2018, xxiii).

10 UNISA Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair and Chief Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute.

11 The Luthuli Museum was opened in 2004 in the original 1927 home (https://luthulimuseum.org.za/). The Museum has instituted an annual commemorative walk. The event takes place during the month of July to coincide with the date of Luthuli’s death (https://luthulimuseum.org.za/).

12 Asmal, xxiii.

13 Luthuli is the first African to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Luthuli’s statue is first (looking from left to right) in the line of South African Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, F.W de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. The quote at the base of Luthuli’s statue reads: “What is important is that we can build a homogeneous South Africa on the basis not of colour but of human values” (https://www.southafrica.net/gl/en/travel/article/nobel-square-cape-town-south-african-history-makers-on-the-waterfront-in-western-cape).

14 On publication, because Luthuli was enduring yet another banning order, his autobiography was immediately banned in South Africa, and possession of the book, if obtained from another country, was a criminal offense.

15 WorldCat (https://www.worldcat.org/search?q = albert + luthuli + let + my + people + go).

16 The Kwela edition includes an address in Luthuli’s honour by then-President Thabo Mbeki and a new introduction by Kader Asmal. It has not included Charles Hooper’s introduction. Furthermore, neither the cover nor the copyright page of this edition mention the role of Charles and Sheila Hooper as amanuenses (although Luthuli’s discussion about their role still appears in the Preface).

17 Early biographies of Luthuli (or Lutuli, as some have it) include Mary Benson's Chief Albert Lutuli of South Africa (1963) and G.J. Pillay's Albert Lutuli (1993). Beatrice Roberts' Albert Luthuli was published in 2006; Scott Couper's Albert Luthuli: Bound by Faith was published in 2010 and again in 2012. These biographies, along with Robert Trent Vinson's recent Albert Luthuli (2018 and 2023) show continued interest in Luthuli the man, but they do not, collectively, show anything like the publication record of Luthuli's autobiography.

18 Of course, the continuum I propose here is not the only one that one could conceptualise for the genre; there could, for instance, be continua ranging from least to most poetic/nostalgic/philosophical/confessional/self-conscious etc. And Marlene Kadar points to the oft evoked continuum of autobiography’s fictiveness: “’autobiographical’ is a loaded word, the ‘real’ accuracy of which cannot be proved and does not equate with either ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ truth. Instead, it is best viewed as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narration to the most fictive” (1992, 10).

19 Fanon argues that correcting the coloniser’s distorted version of history is an important task for “the native intellectual” (1973, 73-74).

20 The tone is generally calm and controlled, but in recounting the catastrophic realities of the combination of centuries of racist laws, climaxing in those like the Pass Laws and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (viz., the creation of overpopulated rural ghettos), the narrator cannot avoid conveying his disgust: “The vast circular tour of people with empty bellies is already under way” (180); there will, he says wryly, “be work enough” for those doctors who accept the government’s invitation to “prey on the poverty-stricken peasants and workless workers” (181) in the disease-ridden Reserves. To us Bantustan means home of disease and miserable poverty, the place where we shall all be swept into heaps in order to rot, the dumping ground of ‘undesirable elements’, delinquents, criminals created especially in towns and cities by the system. And the place where old people and sick people are sent when the cities have taken what they have had to give by way of strength, youth and labour. And still, to the day of death, whether in cities or farms or Reserves, we are tenants on the white man’s land. That is our share of South Africa. Our home is in the white man’s garbage can. (181). He also explains white-speak: the “Extension of University Education” means “the Rape of Fort Hare” (191). This is strong language; but no-one who has studied twentieth century South African history will say that Luthuli’s description is exaggerated or melodramatic.

21 There is so much evidence of the government’s stranglehold on African agriculture. Let me just bring the reader’s attention here to a few key features: the 1913 Land Act allocated 13% of the land – and that “almost always inferior land” (53) – for 70% of the people; the prohibition against African land purchases; the unfair and harmful quota system for sugar farmers (an important crop in Groutville); stock limitation; the law preventing Africans access to the money market (61). One of the consequences of all of these restrictions was to force African men to seek work in white urban areas: “So the family is broken up, and the worker becomes an uneasy dweller in two unrelated worlds” (53; see also 168).

22 Literally, mastery; here, the adherence to master race status.

23 He had been elected to serve on the Native Representative Council. Detractors were proved right: it “was no more than a hollow show” (93).

24 As we learned in appalling detail in TRC testimonies, state sponsored death squads operated outside of even apartheid laws.

25 Luthuli predicted not only the further intensification of state violence but also the fact that it would “be the sign that their end as a master race is beginning. Our strength is greater than our weakness, and they are year by year forced to fall back on undisguised brutality” (170).

26 This imbalance in family life due to a family member’s political activism is seen over and over in stories of life during the apartheid period; but the break-up of the family was extended beyond those who were politically active: apartheid with its Bantustans and pass system caused massive destruction of the family and extended family structures.

27 Jelinek refers to the “autobiographical fallacy”, viz., the stipulation that “the autobiographical mode is an introspective and intimate one” (10). She argues that it is not uncommon for both men (as Shumaker found, cited in Jelinek, 1980, 11) and women autobiographers to say little or nothing about “siblings, children, mates, and romantic attachments” (11). I, too, can think of a great many autobiographies of which this is true; the point I am making, though, is that Luthuli’s reticence is particularly marked.

28 In the Postscript, he mentions that in 1960 two of his daughters, Dr Albertina and Staff Nurse Hilda, met him at Durban Station when he was released from prison (203).

29 Luthuli mentions, without comment, that Nokukhanya gives up her teaching career when they marry. She establishes a home in Groutville, the region from which Luthuli hails. In their case, the couple cannot, he says, establish a home at Adams College where he continues to teach.

30 Though she is the homemaker, her political values are clear (and, of her own accord, aligned with his own) and he notes that she once organised women in the community to establish a clinic. Although she is unwilling to make public speeches because “She sticks to the Biblical advice to take the lowest seat” (42), when she does speak in public “she has the gift of talking good sense” (42).

31 In a footnote, Luthuli adds wryly that the government’s oft-stated (and widely accepted) belief that Africans will need to match the 2000 years it took for the development of Western civilisation should not encourage Africans “to pin any hopes on A.D 3960”; one Nationalist Member of Parliament announced that, even then, Africans would not be “allowed” to vote (43)!

32 The narrator, as is often the case, uses this feature of his life story to point to the broader political implications. African families, across the nation, are split asunder by the policies of the racist state. He does point out, though, that unlike most, his family was lucky because the separation lasted for “only eight years” (41).

33 His love for his mother is apparent also when he gives up chance to study at Fort Hare so that he can take care of her.

34 Incidentally, the Fontana edition to which I refer in this essay contains no photos of Nokukhanya or the children. (There are 5 photos in total, 4 of which are of Luthuli.) The Kwela edition (2018) includes several photos of family members and thus, pictorially, offers readers a greater sense of Luthuli the family man. There are 15 photos in total, one of which is a family photo of Albert and Nokukhanya Luthuli with all seven of their children and their first grandchild. Three photos feature Luthuli and Nokukhanya on their way to, or in, Oslo for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. One photo captures Luthuli with two of his daughters; another shows Luthuli with Nokukhanya and their daughter Jane; one is of Luthuli with his grandson; and another portrays Nokukhanya at her husband’s grave in April 1981, almost 15 years after his death.

35 The genre has, of course, undergone changes since Spacks published her essay in 1980, and, in some respects, reader expectations will also have changed. But, for some sectors of the reading population, the expectation of “self-display” is even greater. Consider the tell-all autobiographies which have been published (in and beyond South Africa) since 1980 which reveal intimate and often shocking details about the author’s sex life and confess to substance abuse, prostitution, and even criminal acts (including murder) by the author.

36 Jelinek refers to what she calls the “autobiographical fallacy”, viz., the stipulation that “the autobiographical mode is an introspective and intimate one” (1980, 10). Certainly, introspection and intimate disclosure do not across the board – though, of course, one can think of striking exceptions as far back as what is widely acknowledged to be the first autobiography, The Confessions by Augustine. In the years since the ‘80s, however, the expectation of sometimes scandalous self-disclosure dominates the genre. Nonetheless, again, Luthuli’s restraint is exceptional.

37 The reference is to Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography.

38 In setting the historical record straight, in insisting on ethical principles – calmly, sometimes (astonishingly) even respectfully, in meticulous detail and employing reasonable argument – Let My People Go can be seen as a response to intensifying state brutality, “the abandonment of any pretence of the rule of law” (184) and the flagrant “crisis of truth” (Felman 1992, 63).

39 Readers will be aware that Nelson Mandela echoed these words in the closing of his 20 April 1964 Rivonia Trial speech.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Coullie

Judith Lütge Coullie is Senior Research Associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a learning advisor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Publications include Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness (with Andries Visagie, 2014); Remembering Roy Campbell (2011) and The Closest of Strangers (2004).